Imaging and Imagining the Ghost Dance: James Mooney's Illustrations and Photographs, 1891-1893

Fundamental to the way the Ghost Dance of 1890 has been perceived and visualized are the images James Mooney used to illustrate his 1896 Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology report on the ceremonial. Besides portraits of the principal as well as the peripheral participants, Sitting Bull the Hunkpapa and Sitting Bull the Arapaho, scenes of Wounded Knee and of the survivors of the massacre, Mooney also included eight illustrations of the Dance in progress. In the course of the century since Mooney published, his illustrations, and the photographs upon which they are based, have continued to be used to evoke and to illustrate the Ghost Dance. But the photographs themselves have not seldom been examined for their ethnographic and historical content, let alone for what they can say about the processes of imaging and imagining the Ghost Dance.

  thanks to wood s lot